lumous [sveta free time]

The elven girl's jaw was clenched with determination as her eyes scanned the time-weathered pages of her textbook. She wanted to learn how to enchant and scribe scrolls, but all of the books they had to offer were only written in common. Most elves these days could read both Common and Elven, but Sveta was at a fairly strong disadvantage. Her village was only populated by elves, so all she needed to know was elven. At this point, she could speak and understand Common, but reading and writing it was still really difficult for her.

Sveta was lucky to be able to read and understand quite a few languages. However, learning Common in Esfir was seen as a form of betrayal. Associating yourself with humans in any way was reprehensible.

She quietly cursed her villages name under her breath, squinting at the unfamiliar characters.

["If I could help, I would. I am not good at reading this either."] Zed tried to comfort the stressed girl, his head resting over her shoulder so he could read the textbook as well. ["Would you like to take a break? You have been working very hard."]

["Maybe after this scroll... I'm almost done."]

She jotted down the approximate words for a simple fire spell in Elven script, carefully translating each word to the best of her abilities. As she finished the last word and signed it off with an enchantment sigil in her favorite purple ink, the text flashed gold down the page for a moment. Success!

Or so she thought. Her celebration was short-lived, as the bottom of the page started to dissolve into flames. Flailing around and making plenty of noise in the quiet of the guild hall, Sveta desperately tried to put the flaming scroll out. Zed watched in amusement, the flame was rather small and couldn't cause too much damage to anything.

In her frantic movements, she fell back in her chair and watched on the floor in front of her as the paper anticlimactically dissolved into nothing but a few ashes.

Her view now upside-down, she saw a figure standing in the slightly opened doorway of her room.

"...You didn't see all of that, did you?"